It was a September day, hot and dusty, normal. Meryem Sultan was lined up in front of the school with three classes of Uyghur schoolkids waiting for the buses. Back when she was nine, Meryem hated these school trips to the country. She had to pick caterpillars off the crops because, she was told, Chinese people liked to eat them. Kind of weird. When she was ten, what bugged her was that she was the smartest kid in the class, but now the teachers said they had to pick cotton. Then they told Meryem off, right in front of everyone — “Meryem, your results at school mean nothing. If you can’t pick cotton? You’re useless.” It was humiliating, but other kids were getting regular beatings for slacking off. Anyway, it was “just part of going to school” so Meryem did it. Turned out, she could pick faster than almost anyone in the class, especially the boys. Once she got going, she was “an addict.”
